


Pyre

by sapphire_child



Series: Season 13 Bits [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode: s13e01 Lost and Found, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 04:03:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12473048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphire_child/pseuds/sapphire_child
Summary: There’s something intimate about preparing a body for a hunter’s funeral.





	Pyre

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aiming to do a coda/episode related fic for each ep this season as a means to stop me from going totally bananas in the final months of my PhD. Let's see how we go!

There’s something intimate about preparing a body for a hunter’s funeral. The familiar steps of wrapping and binding with cloth. It reminds him of some of the other burial rites he’s researched for cases. Coins on the eyes to pay the boatman. Amulets wrapped in layers of bandages. All the creepy Victorian stuff like death portraits, and dolls with real human hair. And of course there’s the modern convenience of bodies preserved with formaldehyde so that families can have an open coffin.

He gets it. Hell, Dean’s died enough times to know more than his fair share about leaving people behind and he’s helped prepare bodies for the pyre a million times in his work. Mostly for hunters. People he and his dad had worked jobs with. The occasional civilian, sure. Even rarer, a monster carcass which needed to be burned in order to get rid of the evidence.

But never anybody he was really, properly close to.

John was the first.

The first body he ever wrapped – alone – as Sam built up the pyre that they burned him on.

Since then, he’s prepped more family members for the pyre than he had family to begin with.

Adam was a mess. They’d packed his wounds and wrapped him up best they could, but his body was basically mangled beyond belief.

There wasn’t enough of Jo and Ellen left after the explosion to really bother with burning them. Dean likes to think that they went out in enough fire to help them get through to the other side. Ellen at least hadn’t ever manifested as a ghost which was more comforting than it perhaps should have been.

Bobby – he was a stocky son of a bitch. Hard to wrap, and even harder to lug up on the pyre, even with Sam’s help.

It was a completely different story with Kevin. The kid was a skinny wretch. Even alone, alternating between sobbing and raging, Dean lifted him up easily.

Charlie…

He’d thought at the time that nothing could ever top how he felt as he gently wrapped up her tiny, broken body. Dean had been so furious with his brother that he’d refused all help.

He’s not angry with his brother now. But he sure as hell doesn’t want his help with…

“You should take care of Kelly.” The pyre built, he nods towards the house. Sam worries his lip, blinking back a wave of uncertain tears.

“Are you sure?”

Dean starts moving before he even starts answering, voice gruff. “Take the kid to see his damn mom Sam.”

He doesn’t need anyone to see him like this.

Cas’ face is tinted in death’s familiar blue pallor when he flicks back the sheet. Observes the dark lashes and stubble, the chapped lips for the last time. He can’t look too long though.

It hurts too damn much.

Cas is heavier than he looks. Broader too, which makes him awkward to wrap. It doesn’t help that Dean has to keep stopping to catch his breath and stop himself from completely losing his shit.

He’s dealt with a lot of dead bodies. But he’s never had to try so hard to keep his grief down as he worked.

It’s even worse when he finishes the job, tucking the final bits of the sheet in. Sam and Jack are still upstairs presumably doing the same to Kelly. The pyre is built and, well, he’s gotta get Cas out there. So he does the only, obviously, logical thing.

He picks him – the body – up. And he lugs Cas outside, down the steps, straining with effort the whole damn way because the dude is goddamned heavy.

Dean makes it most of the way to the pyre before he has to set him back down. Squatting beside him, hunched over the body, he closes his eyes and tries to settle his breathing. Air whistles in his nose, rattling out of his lungs like a smoker on his last legs.

He chances another look down at the body, wrapped in a crappy sheet and torn yellow curtains. On impulse he reaches out a hand. It alights somewhere over the chest. It’s steady and still beneath his palm. Unmoving. Dean removes his hand.

Of all the things he expected to feel, it sure as hell wasn’t this...this _nothing._ It’s still so fresh and yet the grief is already pushing past pain and into something beyond it. Like the red-raw numbness he experienced when he tortured souls in Hell. Or maybe the wash of exhaustion that would hit when the latest bout of fight-or-flight adrenaline wore off in Purgatory.

And yet the roaring blankness burns and twists and churns in his guts. It’s something akin to being under the influence of the Mark – or maybe in the clutches of Amara. It hurts and it hurts and it _hurts_. He wants nothing more than to escape, to excise the part of him that is weak and diseased with pain but he’s so tired.

So tired.

When Sam finally appears, Kelly in his arms Dean stands.

“Little help?” he grits out. Sam deposits Kelly quickly and then between them they lift Cas – Cas’ body – up next to hers.

Dean fetches the gasoline.

He starts the fire.

God but he’s sick of saying goodbye.


End file.
